A few days ago I took part in the 4th Extra Credits Game Jam. It was the first game jam I’ve ever finished, and it was pretty fun! The theme was “Connect” and there were a whopping 314 entries, with a time period of about 4 days for people to make a game either as part of team or solo. I worked solo for the jam, and I quickly latched onto the idea of a game where you would play as a telephone switchboard operator. I figured that would enable me to combine both literal physical connection and social connection (though ultimately the game was more literal than I originally intended). I made the game using Ossium, the open source 2D game engine I’m developing, and (surprisingly) it worked out pretty well. I called the game “Please Hold” and you can check it out here.

Overall I’m pleased with how the game turned out, despite the janky code (and the odd bug)! Please Hold is effectively a time management game, where you receive incoming phone calls and you must try and connect as many callers as possible within 5 minutes. One of the useful side effects of taking part in the jam was that it highlighted a few bugs and usability issues with Ossium; for instance, not being able to destroy entities properly! As a result of this and some hasty design decisions you can’t actually get back to the main menu in Please Hold unless you restart the application :P (that particular engine bug has been fixed since the jam, but the game will remain as it is).

I hope to take part in more game jams in future. This was pretty fun, and it also allowed me to actually use Ossium to make something, which is perhaps the most important reason one would create a game engine: to make games!

I hope you found this article interesting! If you want to learn more about Ossium, you can delve into the code on github.